Tag Archives: Poetry
Shame: A Haiku
My blessed teacher
My ego’s sworn enemy
My joy deflated
Half
This is the true face of sin
Eternity on a roundabout
Cut off from your roots
A single, static dimension
Reflections upon dirty glass
An ending most abrupt
The Recounting
Maybe your next step will be your last, but you don’t “get” to know beforehand. And instinct is absent.
The floor under your feet will tell you after the fact whether it was ever, at all, true.
And truth, it has been queried, “What is truth,” but I ask you, what is trust? What is trust?
Trust, kept buoyed by hope, took forever to fall away, and these believing eyes with it.
Expectation is only of the coming eve’ and the promise of exasperated sleep, and I praised it more than once.
One morning revealed the night had stolen the vestiges of trust, breaking free all that hope bound.
The only evidence of either, some sense of un-nameable shock. Something’d been there, but what?
Then life’s replaying of horror: The all that was and the all that’s gone. Each breath, each day, each night.
California, Again
It’s Winter when he does this, so I buy myself time and find flowers somewhere. Color-filled, with thorns that draw my blood which proves I’m alive and not here to stay quiet and blind. These flowers, I cannot help but clutch them in desperate remembrance that it’s Summer somewhere. I was born in the Summer.
Dream Dreamer
Cascading stars
Not falling stars
Nor momentary shooting stars
Night fireflies
Not fly-by-nights
Nor echoes in the dead of night
Not half-attempts at anything
Nor abstract things
Just real things
Artist Credit: Tiger R.; at various ages
If Not Epic, Nothing
A mistake
Of epic, inhuman error
That looks more like betting the house on a whim
Than burning the breakfast toast
As if the gods had prodded
While I, fresh out of faith, felt forced to obey
Lest my heart be finally ripped from me
And my body thrown down the temple stairs
All About Beauty
Maybe when I’m old, then gone, they’ll talk boldly of me
Paint word pictures of the thought I gave, the care I took
Depict the lines on my face without failing the beauty in them
Knowing I’d want them to tell my whole story of success
All of it, and how, but for them, I’d have failed abjectly
Nevada-California
Left alone, on an empty grey pier on a lake on high, a warm windstorm making its way through her hair, its force able and willing to carry her away to further aloneness somewhere, and she, sufficiently calm and willing, is nevermore afraid…never more.
Schools of Thought: A Haiku
Some landfill somewhere
Carries the collateral
From our shifting wants
